This Week in "Windows 8.1 Field Guide": 1.0

At some point, you just need to decide it's done. And that's going to happen this week: After six months of writing, editing, and fixing, Windows 8.1 Field Guide, our new how-to book about Microsoft's latest Windows, is finally ready for publication. We'll be pushing it out to the Kindle and Nook e-book ecosystems as soon as possible and will begin exploring some options for paper publishing as well.

This past week, we started the primping for our long-awaited 1.0 release. We should hit that milestone sometime this week, barring any unforeseen issues. And the book, which is about 580 pages in its current form, will continue to be updated for free during the active lifetime of Windows 8.1. We're looking for feedback on what additional topics we need to address.

But first, 1.0. Here's what we did this week, with the newest posts at the top:

I've been dying to share this one. Martin McClean—Microsoft's "poster guy" and the author of the Posterpedia app for Windows 8—has been working up an amazing cover design for Windows 8.1 Field Guide. We'll probably fiddle a bit with the compass design, but here is where he's at. As you can see, it's amazing!

OK, I think it's fair to say that the 1.0 version of Windows 8.1 Field Guide is very close. This update includes a number of fixes, but the big change, I guess, falls under the consistency/naming correctness umbrella: I was previously using terms like landing page and home screen/page to describe various parts of Modern apps. It now uses the current terms, though I don't like the word "page" to describe a screen, so I've got hub view, section view and details view.

As you might know, Microsoft is getting ready to deliver Update 1 for Windows 8.1 sometime in the next few weeks. As such, we've decided to make sure Windows 8.1 Field Guide is up to date with the changes that are coming in this update. So this update to the book includes a first pass at making that happen. I suspect it won't be the last.

Here's another update to the near-final version of Windows 8.1 Field Guide. This one includes two new sections: "Move the location of the OneDrive folder" in the FILES chapter and "Get app notifications from outside an app" in the APPS folder. Both were your basic oversights, but I think the format of the book makes it easy to plug in new content, and while these don't "prove" that theory, they certainly help support it.

Discuss this Article 17

My dad just (as in, yesterday) upgraded from XP to a shiny new HP all-in-one straight from the Microsoft Store in San Diego. Windows 8.1 is all new to him, and this will be the first resource I throw his way. Thanks for the hard work, Paul!

Will have to get it.
After looking at the cover and then the guys name
(oddly like marty McFly). maybe its somewhat appropriate for guiding users into the future -touch
or into the past desktop.
Nice thx Paul.

The 1.0 release will be "declared" sometime this week, which I think I mentioned above. This works much like an actual Windows release where whatever build has the potential to become the final build, and then the version number is artificially bumped up to whatever number (in this case 1.0).

The number 0.88 indicates that I've published 88 different versions of the full book document since the project started last September. 1.0 isn't necessarily meant to be exact, but rather 'the version that we publish to Kindle and Nook first."

At this moment, 0.88 is the newest/latest version of the book out in the world. I have 0.89 in SharePoint, but haven't changed it past 0.88 (yet). But even the eventually 1.0 release is arbitrary as it will be advanced beyond that fairly immediately.

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